Nukes
First came President Trump’s scrapping of a proposed summit in Budapest on the war in Ukraine and his imposition of sanctions on Russia.
Then came the announcements by President Vladimir V. Putin that Russia had successfully tested two menacing nuclear-capable weapons designed for possible doomsday combat against the United States.
The timing may not have been coincidental, analysts say, and Mr. Putin’s point was clear: Given the serious threat of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, the United States will ultimately need to respect Moscow’s power and negotiate — like it or not.
It’s a message the Kremlin has relied on in its brinkmanship with the United States dating back to the days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union regularly emphasized that for the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, negotiation was a necessity, not an option. More recently, Moscow has underscored that attempts to isolate Russia, including with the recent U.S. sanctions on Russian oil producers, were doomed to fail.
Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Andrea Mitchell and Alexander Smith at NBC:
President Donald Trump said this week that he wants the Defense Department to begin testing nuclear weapons "immediately," but experts say that's wishful thinking.
The U.S. has only one location where such testing could take place, an underground facility at the former Nevada Nuclear Test Site near Las Vegas. Preparing the site for testing would require hundreds of millions of dollars and at least two years, nuclear experts said. site for testing would require hundreds of millions of dollars and at least two years, nuclear experts
said.
There is no immediacy when it comes to testing," Gregory Jaczko, former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said on "Meet the Press" Thursday.
Trump announced his desire to conduct nuclear tests in a Truth Social post shortly before his meeting this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea.
"Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis," Trump wrote Wednesday. "That process will begin immediately."
Some nuclear weapons experts argue that the U.S. has no technical need to restart nuclear testing and that it could actually wind up benefitting countries like China, because it would in effect give them license to resume testing to advance their less-developed nuclear programs
